Goals Series: Organize Your Computer

Tidy computer, tidy mind. Or something like that 😁. It doesn’t take long for a shiny new desktop or laptop to become cluttered with files, documents and photos of your dog.

When your computer is a digital mess, it can be difficult to locate important files and hard to focus on the task at hand. But spending a couple of hours deleting a bunch of files is only a temporary fix. In a few months time, your files will have run wild once again, and you’ll be right back where you started. To get and keep things in order, you’ll need is a system.

Filing

Your files should have clear and logical break downs, to make searching easy. For example:

This is better than simply storing the document under ‘Work Documents’ and risking not being able to find it – or sending an earlier iteration of logo designs. You can use your folders as a ‘To-Do’ assistant, too. In this case, a ‘For Approval’ folder would work well where documents could be temporarily stored while they await client approval.

Naming

Consistently naming files is the only way to make searching for files easy. Decide on a naming pattern for certain kinds of files and stick to it. TextExpander can help here by allowing you to store your file naming pattern in a snippet, ready to expand whenever you need it. Here’s a snippet we use for TextExpander blog post images:

Backing Up

Having a hard drive fail on you whilst working on a big project can cost hours of work. And it needn’t be a big project. Losing photographs, articles, academic papers, among other important documents, can be upsetting as well as time-consuming. Back up your files in as many ways possible, or at least one onsite backup and one offsite backup.

For offsite backup consider a service such as Backblaze. Even just using Dropbox for file storage, while not a real back up, is still better than not. For onsite storage, set up an external hard drive with regular automatic backups. Macs have made this simple with Time Machine. Windows also has options for automatically backing up your files.